As I started my research on Alice to find related books for my book, “perspectiva pictorum et architectorum” by Andrea Pozzo, I first focused on the most obvious term perspective. Also as the brain I used the Xenotheka Library to keep the search as wide as possible. As the topic of conversation, I used architecture. I noticed that the term perspective appears several times in various books. Often, however, in a different context. Not as part of an architectural description but more as a synonym for the word point of view. Nevertheless, I found it interesting to look at these books a bit more closely, especially the book “Eighteenth century architecture, by Van Eck. The title interested me because the author of my book died at the beginning of the 18th century.
In Alice, I tried to understand the context of the sentences in which the word perspective appears. It was noticeable that these were often captions or references to illustrations. Since my book is practically all illustrations, I decided to take a closer look at the content of the book, and I noticed that it also has a lot of illustrations.
Many of the illustrations are drawn in a special perspective which is also highlighted in the captions.
In terms of content, I couldn’t really make a connection. However, in the last assignment, I found out that my book is primarily a textbook on how to draw perspectives. Therefore, I see the reference in the illustrations. Especially the illustration on page 111 reminds me of the way Pozzo designed his pages. One could assume that the artists of these illustrations have read Pozzo’s instructions.
As a second step, I wanted to find a book that had more connections to Pozzo in terms of content. As an idea I had a modern instruction book for perspective drawing. This time as a brain I first tried the Architecture Library, as the topic of conversation I tried draw and as a term again perspective. This search was a dead end. I tried it again with the Architecture Library. This time I used perspective already as the topic of conversation and searched for textbook. The outcome wasn’t really what I expected.
The book which had the most connections to Andrea Pozzo’s “perspectiva pictorum et architectorum” was the “Oxford Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art”. Again, there is no connection in the content. However, my book is also a kind of a dictionary. It shows all possible perspectives and how to draw them.
Since I was not yet completely satisfied with the results of my research, I tried to enter the name of the author directly as a search term in the hope that there might be illustrations of my book in an other book. Unfortunately, my search was unsuccessful here as well.